Yet here I am almost crying over a frightened dog and a storm and the sudden empty space in the bed beside me. I need to get a hold of myself, and not just because I feel like a pathetic fool. I need to do it because what if something has happened to Noah?
Trudy sure seems to think that’s the case. I take one of the steps down but she’s still whining away. A glance back and I see her skittering in the opposite direction, then when I take another step she goes one farther. She barks—and that’s when I hear it and realize the problem is not downstairs.
Something is clattering in the attic. Something that sounds like a pair of shutters in the wind or a screen door banging back and forth. And though I want to still be wary at the idea of both of those things, somehow I can feel my dread shifting. A number of threads in my head start to come together, and none of them say anything about a murderer being in the house. That idea just wasn’t plausible.
This one is.
I run to the little door at the end of the hall with it pounding through me, half praying that no one is waiting on the other side. Half praying that someone is. If Noah is there, then everything is possibly okay.
But of course he isn’t. He isn’t even standing by the window I knew would be open, getting wet and cold but really nothing much more than that. No, no, no—that would be too simple. I could just stay with him then, until he wakes up. I could close the window and put a blanket around him and wait out another bout of sleepwalking.
I can’t wait out this.
How can I, when he could plummet to his death at any moment? I look out and there he is, standing on the fucking guttering around the house. That buckling, busted old bunch of bullshit, in his goddamn underwear with the rain pouring down and the lightning cracking like a motherfucker and Trudy barking and barking at me to do something.
I was wrong about an intruder being my absolute nightmare.
This is my absolute nightmare.
If he falls, I will fall with him. I know it—any fool could see it. The whole thing is suddenly there in front of me, as brilliant and blazing as anything I’ve ever felt. I love him too madly, too deeply. I love him so much I was willing to go downstairs and face a psychopath to save him. I love him so much I slide out onto the sill without even thinking about it.
And I shout his name so loud the thunder seems silent by comparison.
“Noah,” I scream, and when he doesn’t react, I try to think how I can get out there to him. I try to imagine how he got out there in the first place. The window is one of those arched affairs that stands proud of the house, and the guttering seems like miles away. He must have somehow climbed on top of the frame then slid over there, even though that seems like total fucking insanity.
How do you manage that while asleep?
Then it occurs to me, in a black rush.
What if he isn’t asleep? What if this is a suicide attempt, brought on by me pushing him into things he doesn’t want to do? I thought I was letting him decide, but now that I think about it, I kind of want to stop. My requests were too much, and the throat thing was so insane, and now here we are.
Right at me murdering him with sex.
“Noah, if you can hear me—please don’t do this, okay? Just let me talk to you, or you can talk to me, or we can never see each other again. I swear to God, if you just come back inside, or just, I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, but I’m coming out there to you, all right?” I say, but saying is really not the same as doing. Everything is just so slippery, and the rain is in my eyes, and, God, the drop is enormous.
I have to sink my teeth into my bottom lip—so deep I taste blood—just to stand up on the window ledge. And once I do, I have no idea if I can really climb up onto the arch. I’m not even sure if I have the physical strength to do the hauling necessary—God only knows how strong he is. Or how fast and graceful and good.
And he might have done it all while sleeping.
If we get out of this, I swear I’m going to enter him into the Olympics. What he was doing teaching I have absolutely no clue, because this is some next-level shit. I manage to get a hold of a slightly loose board and pull myself up an inch or two, and that’s pretty much my limit. Though to my credit, this has nothing to do with my physical fitness.
And everything to do with the board giving way.
It snaps right off in my hand like it’s made of paper, at which point I know I’m fucked. My feet are barely on the ledge. There’s literally nothing else to hold on to. The thing goes and I jerk back and the only thing that’s there to catch me is empty air. I even see the headline: Woman Dies Trying to Save Her Sleepwalking Boyfriend.
About a second before Noah snatches me back from the brink.
Though maybe snatches is the wrong word. It’s much more like the fist of an angry god reaches down and hauls me back. His grip is so strong, and so fierce, that for a second I somehow imagine it isn’t him at all. He was all the way over there a second ago, anyway. It can’t be him. It has to be Humphries, come to get me after all.
And then I look up through strands of wet hair and the rain beating down and down on us and I see his face. I see his expression, as torn up as my own, that hand fisting in my nightdress and the other tight around me. Body half-sprawled and half-contorted over that arch just to reach me in time.
At which point I know—he loves me too deeply, too.
So deep, I think, that we’re both about to drown.
HE DOESN’T SPEAK for a long, long time after that. And when he finally does, it’s only because I dare to ask the question I would really rather avoid. I wait until we’re wrapped in towels in the bathroom, puddles forming beneath our feet and the silence like a stranglehold between us, and then I just have to say something.
“Did you do that because of me? Am I pushing you to it?”
And I guess he has to say something, too. He leans back against the tiled wall, face as weary as I’ve ever seen it, and tells me something that I would rather poke out my own eyes than hear.
“I don’t worry about what our time together does to me. I worry about what it does to you. I’m pretty much used to climbing out on rooftops and waking up in Walgreens—but you almost definitely aren’t. In fact, I would say you’re just about the worst nighttime roof explorer I’ve ever seen.”
“That isn’t funny, Noah.”
“I didn’t intend it to be. I rarely make jokes at the thought of you horribly plummeting to your death because I sleepwalk.”
“I didn’t horribly plummet anywhere.”
“Is the insertion of an almost in there really all that helpful?”
“Well, no but—”
“You could have died.”
“This isn’t how the conversation is supposed to go. You’re the one out there, doing God knows what because of trauma I am probably making worse. Stop trying to make this about me—what about you? What about how you feel?” I ask, but he just shakes his head and circles back around to the beginning of the conversation again.
“I feel that I’m hurting you. Putting you in danger.”
“Because you went for a nighttime walk?”
“Because being around me is dangerous.”
“That’s bullshit. You know that’s bullshit, right?”
“If I was you I’d probably think so, too,” he says, pausing just long enough to make it clear that something else is coming. I can almost see the shadow of it slanting across his face. I can hear it lurking in the silence, dark and terrible. “But then you don’t know everything about me, do you? I’ve taken great pains to make sure you don’t even ask.”
“What? What are you. . .what are you saying?”
I hate how flummoxed I sound. It has a ring of denial to it.
“I make sure you don’t ask, no matter how much you want to.”
“That’s insane. How would you do that?” I ask, and though I throw up my hands and make a big show of incredulity, some part of me is dreading his answer. Not because I think that
he must be hiding some terrible secret—I know that he could never say anything too terrible for me to hear. No, no, it’s the idea of how deep he can drive in the knife that scares me.
All the way into the hilt, blade so sharp it barely stings as it goes in.
“By making sure you feel guilty for even wanting to know.” He pauses it again then, but this time it’s worse. This time I’m bleeding through the silence, and completely unprepared for his next words. He just says them so casually, so coolly. So matter-of-fact.
“Please don’t feel manipulated. I do it almost unconsciously. After Humphries they sent me to a dozen shrinks, and I did the same thing with all of them. Sometimes, I was barely even aware of it—and they certainly weren’t. I would tell them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they signed my forms and files, and everyone believed I was okay. And I am, in a certain manner of speaking.”
“Too smart for therapy. Too smart for your own good.”
“I would say so, yes. I’m so smart that I’m going to tell you to walk away, and you’re going to listen. I even know how to make it so good you need never look back. It’ll be easy, like sinking into a warm bath full of your own blood.”
He’s right, of course. I can already feel it filling up the tub.
It’s just that I’m not sinking in at all. He’s forcing me down.
“Then don’t do it. Don’t do it. Let’s just go back to bed and make love and forget any of this ever happened. Next time you take a walk, I’ll just let you. Or I’ll be better at coming for you—I’ll get a ladder. This isn’t a reason to break up. You’re just trying to think of one because you don’t want to deal with things.”
He smiles at that—but dear Lord, it’s the most deathly one I think I’ve ever seen. It looks like the kind of thing you see frozen onto the face of a corpse. Nothing in the world could be bitterer, except maybe his eyes. He won’t look directly at me, but I can see them anyway. They seem lost, and as flat as he once told me they are to anyone else.
“You could be right. You probably are. I think sometimes you see me as the clever one, but you are infinitely smarter than I am in almost every way. You push through, where I retreat. You take back, where I give up. And when I tell you that I lied to you and kept you from the worst of me you’ll walk away, because walking away is the right thing to do.”
“Nothing you can say will make that happen, Noah.”
“Do you ever wonder why I keep my clothes on?”
“I don’t have to wonder, you told—” I start, but even before I finish I know I’m wrong. He never said to me that his aversion to sex meant clothes on at all times. I just assumed. I guess I assumed a lot of things, in my race to never disturb any of his boundaries.
“I didn’t tell you anything. I made sure you wouldn’t ask, because underneath my clothes I look like this.”
He takes off his T-shirt as though it hurts to do it. The muscles that make that move happen have atrophied, apparently—and I can see why. He probably keeps all of his clothes on even when he’s alone. I know I would if I had those reminders of some nightmare all over me, and especially if I got them the way he did.
The way he then tells me about, in that same dull professor’s voice.
“The one over my ribcage was a butcher’s knife ringed with razor wire. You can see where it cut me on the inside—that’s what makes it pucker in this unpleasant way. Of course, the fact that he left it in there for a few days contributed to the mess, but really the one I remember is this here on my thigh,” he says, and then he looks away—almost as though he’s reminiscing about some happy event. Only the event is this: “I did that one myself on day four, when he raped and murdered a woman in front of me.”
“Oh God, Noah. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I say, but only because the real words I want to use don’t exist. They beat against the bars of my heart, too full of my feelings to live out there in the real world. He thinks he’s to blame. He always thinks he’s to blame even though he lied, he lied; oh, fuck, he said it was just writing and feeling guilty and instead there’s this.
His body, like a road map to the middle of hell. Not just in terms of the scars—though they are numerous and nightmarish beyond anything I could comprehend—but in the shape and tone of his every muscle. He looks as though he spends his time climbing mountains in the dark. Terrible mountains filled with mountain lions, which all want to eat him.
This is why he’s bigger than any professor should be, I realize.
This is why he can leap across the roof like an Olympian.
Because he’s still there amid the jagged rocks, fighting for his life.
“What are you sorry for? For me? Don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for them. I told you, remember—they were murdered because of things I said and did. I just got what I deserved.”
“How can you say that? How can you think that?”
“Because he told me, right after he took me hostage,” he says, but it has the opposite effect to the one he intends. I think he wants me to see surety in that. To believe Humphries somehow, even though Noah has to know I never could. He talks about being taken hostage as though that was really nothing at all and then he echoes the words of his abuser.
“You could have told me all of this. It doesn’t change anything—it only makes me surer that none of this was your fault. That you’re not responsible for the crimes of someone else. No one is ever responsible for their own torture.”
“The thing is you say that, you say it and yet I know the second I tell you that I need to be strangled when you fuck me because if you don’t I imagine I’m strangling you. . .I will see the flinch in your gaze. It isn’t just in dreams, Beth. It feels real to me. It’s my reality.”
God, he always sounds so sure.
It makes it hideously hard to fight against—but goddamn it, I try. I put on my armor and get every weapon in my arsenal, and I launch them at him. I speak as though my tongue is on fire. I push every word out with all the conviction in my body.
“I could run across the room, and it still wouldn’t make any difference. He was the killer, not you. He was the rapist, not you. You’re the kind of man who hides his scar-covered body just because you think I might be afraid. Who wants to be fucking throttled in case a single thought about a horribly traumatizing incident leaps to the forefront of your mind. If I flinch, it isn’t because I’m scared. It’s because it hurts me that this happened to you. It hurts me to hear you talk like this. It’s just not okay to feel this way about yourself,” I say, half spitting by the time I’m done and so red in the face he couldn’t fail to miss it. My hands are shaking fists at my sides—hell, my toes have clenched as tightly as my fingers have.
And for a moment, I think it’s made a difference.
He cocks his head to one side, like he’s taking it in.
Only he’s not taking it in at all. He’s getting ready to fire his own weapons right back at me, sharper than anything I could manage and twice as blistering.
“Is it okay that you have a pattern?”
“What? What are you—”
“You have a pattern. You go from one abusive man to another.”
“Don’t you dare fucking say that to me. Don’t you say that about yourself. Some psycho took you hostage and fucked your mind forever and you’re going to call yourself abusive? Don’t fucking bullshit me, Noah. I can smell it a mile away,” I say, so furious I can hardly get the words out. They emerge in a big messy jumble, while his replies remain as calm and certain as they were a second ago.
I don’t even know if he really believes this stuff.
It sounds like he’s reading from a book—and maybe he is.
It’s called: How to Get Your Girlfriend to Leave You in Ten Easy Steps.
“And yet I can already see you leaving.”
“I don’t want to leave. I don’t want you to feel this way.”
“But I always will. Love doesn’t magically heal all wounds.”
I hate the way
he says that. I hate how sardonic his voice has become—so unlike him it hurts to hear. By this point, I know this is just a book, a script, a series of mechanical moves. But Lord in heaven, to hear him speak that word in this context. . .
“Don’t say love in the middle of that sentence, oh my God,” I say, and then I have to put my hands over my eyes. Listening to him is already too much. Looking and seeing the contrast in his face—between the things he’s doing on purpose to drive me away and the pain it’s causing him to do it—is unbearable. Monstrous. Inhumane.
No one has ever been crueler to him than he is to himself.
“Then pretend I didn’t. Just walk away, and on Sundays we can wave to each other across the street, and sometimes as we’re out walking we might meet, and not so far from now, you’ll start dating some perfectly normal guy who never thinks about murder in the middle of making love and never makes you risk your life on some rooftop, and I’ll see you together. I’ll be glad, I’ll be so glad, because more than anything, my love, I want you to be safe and happy. Part of being in love with someone is knowing that their happiness is more important than any transitory dream that we might have conjured up, for just a moment,” he says, voice softer now but no less torturous.
“It wasn’t a dream,” I say, from the middle of the river that’s running down both sides of my face. Forlorn now, and all the fight gone out of me.
“But it is now. Go on, love. Go live your happy, normal life.”
And so I do, even though he doesn’t understand.
I will never be happy and normal again.
Chapter Ten
I DO MY best to go back to my life the way it was. But the trouble is—my life the way it was had no Noah in it. If I’m being honest, it had nothing in it. Every day was exactly the same as the one before it, and where once that routine kept me safe, now it does nothing but stifle me. It steals my breath. I go to work and feel as though I’m walking into a prison.
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